Ever since childhood, I haven’t been very athletic. I always preferred to curl up with a book or a puzzle over any outdoor activities. Even when sports were required at school, I was always among the slowest runners in my class, or even my grade. I was on a swim team for awhile as a teen, but I was always the slowest or second slowest swimmer on the team. The only “exercise” I could do with any confidence in my own ability were table tennis and skiing. I also enjoyed swimming and dancing, but all four of those activities were difficult to access with any sort of regularity.
At some point, I realized that exercise had become something that I associated with general unpleasantness: pushing my body into exertion knowing that I would only get sweaty and uncomfortable (and probably look ridiculous doing it), knowing that I would be terrible at it. I knew that if anyone was around, surely they would scoff and mock me for my sheer inability to run fast enough or long enough, or the way I’d keel over after what to anyone else wasn’t very much exertion. (Unfortunately, the mockery I’d experienced throughout my childhood and teenage years had created certain expectations in me.)
In short, I had come to dread the prospect of any sort of exercise. As I’ve mentioned before, I also was unaware for a long time that I had anxiety, and couldn’t explain why the prospect of doing anything that got my heart rate up was sometimes an extremely psychologically tumultuous experience. But even after identifying this problem, while it did give me a defense at long last, I couldn’t find a way to effectively exercise. I also couldn’t find the will to try very hard to learn to like something that I knew I hated and could never remember enjoying to begin with.
The change began with my sister’s invitation to do a 30 days of yoga challenge on YouTube with her. We lived an ocean away from each other, but she suggested we do one video a day “together.” It was exactly what I needed. The idea that it was for my mind rather than my body got me over my dread of exercise. The instructor Adriene was soothing and offered enough alternatives for people with varying degrees of flexibility, which helped me by letting me simply enjoy the movements and the poses and the breathing without getting caught up in my lack of flexibility or weak muscles. The prospect of doing this “with” my sister kept me going even on days when I didn’t necessarily have that much will to exercise.
At first, I only did yoga in little bouts of a week or two, only to forget or lack the time for another week or two before resuming the habit again. But little by little, I grew more comfortable moving in my own body, and I grew more comfortable with its abilities and limitations. I came to enjoy exerting myself through yoga. Before I knew it, the sheer dread I had once felt at the prospect of exercise had faded away into a light pulse of nervousness.